Community Links

Welcome to UWG: President Kyle Marrero

President Marrero named one of the 100 Most Influential Georgians for 2014 by Georgia Trend

Dr. Marrero with Ben Young (L) and Neely Young (R), Co-Editors in Chief and Publishers of Georgia Trend Magazine

Office of the President

Fruits in Winter
February 2015

Greetings friends and colleagues,

February is an exciting month at UWG. Sure, it’s cold outside, but the fires of inspiration and progress are burning strong within and we have some amazing things happening in the next 28 days.

Soon, the 2015 Employee Engagement Survey Team will launch this year’s survey. This year, the instrument was designed and written completely in-house and we have reached an agreement wherein UWG will retain intellectual property rights and therefore benefit when other institutions use our survey. The survey we complete here will continue to be facilitated by an outside agency so as to assure participants of confidentiality, but our survey center will have the opportunity to field surveys for other institutions and entities. While this wasn’t our primary intent in fielding the original survey, it’s a huge benefit to the university and a great example of how stretching outside your comfort zone can have remarkable unanticipated, entrepreneurial results.

Our primary goal for the survey was and remains to solicit feedback from our greatest asset: our people. As with last year, your honest, engaged participation is critical to our ability to become sought after as the best place to work, learn, and succeed. Please use this opportunity to share your opinions and experiences. You voice will continue to be heard.

This is also the month for our fourth Leadership Development Institute retreat. We’ve worked hard over the last year to iron out the wrinkles and find what works best for UWG and our people. We’re programming our retreats to empower the strategic plan and we’re focusing intently on developing strong, effective leadership skills. At this and future retreats, we will be emphasizing individual leadership development, strategic planning and assessment, addressing difficult dialogues and communication-building. We feel these areas are critical to developing the inclusive, strategy-minded culture of high achievement and evidence-based leadership.

In addition, we’re beginning to see a true cultural shift within our university. We are thinking and acting more strategically than ever and we actually have begun to speak in the language of our strategic plan – not simply because we’re supposed to or because our accrediting bodies want us to – but because our people believe in our imperatives. We are becoming hard-wired to reach for student success, academic success, partnership success, and operational success. We are beginning to believe that we actually can become the best comprehensive university in the nation.

So, while winter may seem a strange time to begin seeing the fruits of our labor, that’s exactly what’s happening. I continue to be excited about our future and proud to work with such a great team. Thank you for your commitment to our growth!